Widening achievement gap is the most troubling test result

Updated 9:13 pm, Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The numbers have been in for a week now. They've been written about, and written about. They've been analyzed, discussed and explained.

While we can still argue about how much stock we should put in them, everyone in town should agree that the 2013 results on the Connecticut Mastery Test and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test are not where they should be.

While Greenwich remains healthily above state averages when it comes to percentages of students meeting the goal standard on the tests, that is not good enough. Not for this town.

Measured against the communities most demographically similar to it in the state, those who inhabit with Greenwich District Reference Group B, and Greenwich consistently ranks in the bottom half. Same as it has for the last several years.

More troubling, the achievement gap between affluent and non-affluent students is growing wider. That is not the same as recent years. The gap had been closing. Its widening again is a development the schools must do all they can to stop.

The district's Hispanic and black students also trailed their white and Asian peers by wide margins on this year's tests.

That those two findings mirror each other is not surprising as the groups on the low end of those achievement gaps tend to substantially overlap.

While acknowledging the scores are not where he wants them, Superintendent William McKersie has argued that test scores are only one indicator of a school system's quality among many. On that count he's right. But they are also the most concrete, which is one of the reasons why they are given such weight.

Standardized tests such as the CMT and CAPT were not designed to measure or rank school systems. The No Child Left Behind law elevated the tests' importance dramatically, which has done a tremendous amount of damage in narrowing the scope of what millions of kids are taught in schools all over the country.

Regardless, we are stuck with them. Current reforms, including the Common Core and the new state teachers' evaluations, are heavily reliant on testing.

The tests, however, while overweighed, are not irrelevant. When there is a persistent gap, now growing, of some 30 points between different segments of students, it is a sign of a clear problem, one that has been with us for far too long, one which we must never cease doing our best to solve.